There are two parts to Django i18n, that need to be treated separately: Program Internals, and Templating system. This page is an attempt to create an overview of what needs to be done, in order to generate discussion. Eventually, some more tickets will be created out of these steps.

Program Internals

This is not an exhaustive list, we need to identify more things to do, and go into more detail.

New Code

The ​gettext module seems an ideal place to start, but both the gettext module and it's sibling, the ​locale module, seem to only really work well for single-threaded, single-locale applications. Since part of the i18n effort is to try to enable working with multiple-language websites, it seems that we must unfortunately create a lot more of the i18n framework than we would otherwise have thought. The two modules are not a total loss, we can still use large amounts of them as long as we can specify the locale on-the-fly, they are just not perfect for our need. See ​this message for problems with gettext and ​this message for problems with locale and subsequent discussions on the thread.

Create our own string type which will do translations lazily on an as-required basis. Will need to cope with slicing, and locale-specific interpolation of numbers, dates, etc. See I18nString? for a more detailed specification.

Work out how to set locale to be per-session, with appropriate fallbacks.

Locale negotiatation: HTTP Defines an Accept-Language header (see section 14.4 of the ​HTTP RFC), a Django app should by default send out content in the preferred language of the browser, or if that is not available, work down the list of acceptable languages, trying to find one until giving up and falling back on the default language.

In any case, a user-set locale should override any negotiated locale. If I'm in a Turkish internet café, the page should come up in Turkish until I click on English, at which point I should continue in English.

Current Code that needs modifying

Identify all strings in all modules that need internationalising. I suggest one ticket per major module group, e.g. core, meta, templatetags.

This includes all error messages. If exceptions with error messages are passed on to the user (e.g. Database errors), these need to be intercepted and translated appropriately, even if it's just adding something like "A Database Error Occurred: " before printing out the traceback or message.

Recode meta.*Field to print out the translated field name even if no field name was specified

This probably means coding up some sort of .pot file generator in django-admin.py or similar utility that understands things like meta.*Field models having a default name when none is specified.

Ensure that all code can cope with unicode strings. Specifically, remove all references to str() and any string interpolation using non-unicode strings for anything other than essential data that needs keeping as strings, e.g. module names.

Modify generic views to cope with locale template searching, both explicitly passed on locales (for websites that want to have http://example.com/en/2005/08/03/ or http://example.com/2005/08/03/en and implicit locales in things like sessions.

Possibly: Create a generic i18n view, which copes with people sticking locale codes in URLs eg: http://example.com/myapp/en/mypage/ or http://example.com/myapp/mypage/en/

Put locales into the Templating system. Specifically, a locale object needs to be available in all templates for things like making up URLs, and displaying the current locale on the page, and also {% extends %} needs to be made (optionally) locale-aware.

Find an easy way to mark template string for internationalization, and get the template system to deal with this appropriately (or just specify that each language should use its own set of templates, though this can be a big drag if you have 40 languages' worth of templates you want to make a minor change in.)

Fully internationalize things like the date filter, to make sure it prints out locale-specific month names.

Miscellanea, and items for further discussion

How does Plone do it? They claim to be "fully internationalized". They have documentation on how to ​internationalize page templates but I can't find anything for internal strings and objects.

Write documentation on how to do all this stuff, for the programmer. (I'm quite happy to do this -- Moof?)

i18n in Zope

They have extracted the locale data from the ​ICU project, and made several classes that deal with all(?) aspects of i18n/l10n, see: